TORI! TORI! TORI!

CareerPro Global is pleased to announce some recent wins at the Career Directors International (CDI) annual summit, this year in beautiful Savannah, Georgia. CDI sponsors the TORI awards, Toast of the Resume Industry, and this past Saturday our own Director of Veteran Affairs and Senior Writer, Lee Kelley, won the TORI for Best Military Transition Resume. If you want to see more of Lee’s award-winning writing, check him out at our sister blog, http://veteranstransitionhq.wordpress.com/.

Also CPG President and CEO Barbara A. Adams was honored with a special Innovator Award, for bringing quality control and customer satisfaction guarantees to the career management industry with the introduction of the ISO 9001: 2008 certification at our company. If you aren’t sure what this ISO certification means, take a look here to find out why it’s so groundbreaking, bringing regulation to an industry that’s been unregulated for decades: CPG ISO 9001:2008 Certification.

Lee and Barbara weren’t the only TORI winners this weekend. CDI will post a listing of all first, second, and third place winners on their website before year’s end. In the meantime, we send a hearty salute to all the winners! Their work, along with that of the certified writers at CPG, help make this industry strong.  Congratulations!

The latest update on USAJobs 3.0

If you are not currently following USAJOBS on Facebook, I encourage you to do so.  This is the best source of information about the progress of site fixes, straight from the horse’s mouth.  It’s where the CareerPro Global blog gets a lot of it’s new intel fast.

Facebook aside, I did find some not-so-great news this morning about at USAJobs. Below is a repost from Wyatt Cash at AOL:

Updated: Efforts by the Office of Personnel Management to rectify technical problems with its new USAJobs site may have made matters worse, according to a Federal Computer Weekreport, as agency officials continue to work around the clock to remedy the customer complaints.Users trying to apply for jobs on the USAJobs search website have continued to encounter extended timeouts, lost data and incorrect results since the site was relaunched last week.

OPM officials said the new system had been overwhelmed by users. In an effort to help spread the volume, the site had installed a buffer application that attempted to block 6% of incoming traffic on their first attempt. However, Linda Rix, co-chief executive of Avue Technologies Corp., which provides job application services to federal agencies, said based on her company’s authorized tests of the USAJobs system, out of 100 tries, the failure rate was 86%, according to the FCW report.

OPM Associate Director Angela Bailey said today, “USAJOBS 3.0 continues to make steady progress with the new site since its implementation last week. As of Wednesday afternoon, over 180,000 applications are successfully submitted through the new site, 38,067 in the last 24 hour period. Technical teams are working hard to ensure these numbers continue to increase.”

“A common issue among users” she said, “as described on our social media is the extra steps involved with resetting their password. Safeguarding an applicant’s personal information is a top priority and a necessary part of the new website.”

We have also successfully added more hardware capacity to the site including three servers to improve search functionality and job posting. We will continue to work around the clock to assure USAJobs 3.0 provides the best customer service to our millions of applicants and dozens of federal agencies.”

On Tuesday, USAJobs officials “amplified our social media messaging to request people who have been temporarily turned away to hit the refresh button on their browser or the F5 function key…to free up their computer to access the new USAJobs site.”

The technology used to operate the website was completely rebuilt from the ground up over the past 18 months. It also involved moving the job listings and applications data from a system managed by Monster.com and which relied on proprietary software platforms, to one that OPM will now manage which relies on open source software. The new system should ultimately be more flexible and less expensive to operate, and had promised to make applying for federal jobs, among other tasks, easier for end users.

“Before, applicants often had to type in the same information over and over again for each job they applied to,” for instance, said Bailey. “Under USAJOBS 3.0, they can type in that information once and apply to as many jobs as they’d like.”

Thousands of users have complained of problems on USASearch.gov’s and the agency’s social media pages.

(Original article at http://gov.aol.com/2011/10/20/new-federal-jobs-website-still-straining-to-handle-user-volume/)

Senior Executive Service to get standard evaluations

As early as this month, members of the Senior Executive Service will see changes in their performance management system. Recent trends have seen greater weight given to only one of the five core qualifications; the new systems aims to balance the equation, evaluating the SES member as a whole. Rather than overemphasize “results” when evaluating executives’ performance, they want to guarantee at least some consideration of the other four qualifications.

According to the Senior Executive Association, agencies will be able to weight the five qualifications differently, but The Office of Management and Budget will require the “results driven” qualification to make up at least 20 percent of someone’s final score. The other four qualifications will have a minimum weight of 5 percent.

“It’s going to provide some level of uniformity governmentwide on what appraisals look like, while allowing agencies some local discretion,” said Bill Bransford, general counsel for SEA, which represents thousands of SES members. “The idea is to get them on the same page.”

The SEA states that OMB sent an email Sept. 21 that said the new system “will provide a consistent and uniform framework for agencies to communicate expectations and evaluate the performance of SES members, particularly centering on the role and responsibility of SES employees to provide executive leadership.”

The final plan will be unveiled this month, and all federal agencies will transition to it within two years.

But SEA said that designing a new performance management system isn’t the hard part — executing it well is.

“Efforts to re-tool the performance management system are really only valuable in terms of focusing people’s attention on executing the system consistently and well,” SEA said in comments sent to the Office of Personnel Management. “The actual structure is less important than how it’s implemented.”

Share your thoughts with CareerPro Global: Is this change for the better? Will it make any difference in the rating process?

Deadline extended for federal job seekers

From The Washington Post:

Personnel Director John Berry said Wednesday that his staff is working “around the clock” to fix bugs in the government’s revamped Web site for job seekers, who will get a three-week reprieve on application deadlines for most positions.

“We’re not going to rest until we work through these problems,” the director of the Office of Personnel Management pledged.

Since it launched Oct. 11, the new version of USAJobs.gov has been plagued by software and hardware glitches that have made the site difficult or impossible to access. Frustrated applicants have vented on Facebook, and they’re still venting.

“The “new” USAJOBS 3.0 is a complete mess. Literally,” Kelly Antonio Lawson posted on Facebook at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday.

OPM officials blame the problems on an unexpected volume of users who have overwhelmed the system in the last eight days, although Berry said it was unclear whether these are new job seekers or not.

“Any new site has a certain curiosity level to it, maybe that’s it,” he said.

Asked why the agency did not have software in place to handle high volumes before the new site went live last week, Berry said his staff “did try to look ahead” but the volume of users still blindsided them.

As of 4 p.m. Tuesday, 141,289 applications had been submitted on the new site, “so we know the system is working for a lot of people.”

The revamp is supposed to improve the experience of applying for a federal job, with fewer forms to fill out and easier searches.

With the exception of emergency jobs that must be filled quickly, deadlines to apply for thousands of federal jobs listed on the site will be extended by three weeks to accommodate people who were slowed by problems with the Web site, Berry said.

OPM has ordered new servers to speed up the system and let more people in. Berry said about 6 percent of users get a message telling them the site is busy and asking them to return in a few minutes. He urged applicants to remember to refresh their website page.

OPM spent 18 months overhauling the site after ending a contract with Monster.com, which had managed it for between $5 million and $6 million a year. Berry said the government paid “almost double that” last year to keep the site going during the overhaul, but predicted that the costs of managing it in house would decline over five years.

He declined to say how much the fixes are costing.

The new USAJobs site is working for a lot of people!

From USAJobs Facebook page earlier today. That’s a lot of applications, folks!

“As of 4pm yesterday, Americans have submitted 141,289 applications for Federal jobs through the new USAJOBS. So we know the system is working for a lot of people, but we won’t rest until it’s working for everyone!”

USAJobs: The Personal Touch

Here is a new little video from Jay at OPM and USAJobs to explain what’s going on with the site. Good idea.

Jay Cares About Your Experience

USAJobs 3.0 Update and Tip

There are two important things we wanted to share this morning in regard to searching the new and improved USAJobs 3.0 site.

1) When searching, use the ADVANCED search function. All signs point to this being the best and most effective way to find the vacancies you need during this transition period. If you never used the Advanced feature before, don’t be overwhelmed by all the search options. Just choose the one, two, or even three variables you are looking for and ignore the rest. For example, I might be searching for an IT Security position in Virginia for a GS-9. That’s all the information I need to supply, and the vacancies available for those specifications should appear from my Advanced search query.

2) That leads me to my second point. There are not as many vacancies posted right now as there were before the site shutdown and reboot. Some of the various federal departments simply haven’t had time to post all new vacancies yet. They’ll get there, be patient–just understand that part of the problem is that there are fewer vacancies available (for three or four times the normal amount of site users).

According to OPM spokesman Jeff Neal, the issues the site is experiencing are not technical problems but growing pains that will eventually work themselves out. (Click here for the most recent OPM statements.)  While we wait for these growing pains to work themselves out,  remember that the Career Coaches at CareerPro Global are here to help you navigate through the USAJobs site changes. Drop us a line here here to chat.

http://www.careerproplus.com

Some great work by some great folks for some great clients

We recently received feedback from two clients that we want to share.  We love what we do at CareerPro Global, we really do, and feedback like this is icing on top of an already very sweet cake.  Thanks to you, our clients, for entrusting us not only with your job but with your family’s future.

“I am extremely grateful of this service! The customer service is truly second to none! [Chris Shepherd and Kelly Poltrack are] very professional individuals who take PRIDE in helping you. You can’t find service like that anymore hardly. Do me a favor, and clone these people. They really walked me through the process step by step, and ANSWERED ALL OF MY CALLS AND EMAILS in a timely fashion. I did not feel like a number or some statistical worksheet. PLEASE KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK! Best Regards, DU”

“I’ve wanted to have this done for years and finally emailed upon seeing an ad in one of my VA email updates. I am so glad that I did! I received an email response followed by a phone call from Anna Anderson. She answered my questions and made me feel that I was making the right decision in perusing this. Then I was assigned to Mara Addison and she is the consummate professional. She took the information that I gave her and turned it into the perfect government resume. I have no doubt that I will obtain an interview because of this resume and I am so very pleased with the services provided to me by CareerPro!  SB”

Come see us at http://www.careerproplus.com and let us make you happy too.

21st Century Career Series: books you can really use

Did you know that besides being the nation’s top resume service, CareerPro Global also writes books? It’s true. This past year, due to public demand, we started publishing our 21st Century Career Series of books.

Currently available are the Roadmap to the Senior Executive Service andRoadmap to Becoming an Administrative Law Judge.  Next month, fittingly on Veteran’s Day, we’ll release our third book in the series, Roadmap to Job-Winning Military to Civilian Resumes.

We could not be more excited about these books. Not only were they fun for us to write but, most importantly, they will be a great resource to those of you who fall into these unique fields and are unsure where to turn for information that is guaranteed to work.

How do we know our Roadmaps will successfully guide you on the path to a new career?  CareerPro Global has an 85% success rate in getting its clients through the door and into an interview. Plus we have a 99.6% satisfaction rate from all of our clients.

Now that is information you can trust.

To purchase the Senior Executive Service and Administrative Law Judge books today, click here To place a pre-order for the Military to Civilian Resumes book,click here.

Do you have any specific questions about our services and how we could be assistance to you? Follow this link to our main website and contact us for a free, no obligation consultation. We’ll be back in touch with you in no time at all.  Contact us for a free consultation today.

21st Century Career Series: books you can really use

Did you know that besides being the nation’s top resume service, CareerPro Global also writes books? It’s true. This past year, due to public demand, we started publishing our 21st Century Career Series of books.

Currently available are the Roadmap to the Senior Executive Service and Roadmap to Becoming an Administrative Law Judge.  Next month, fittingly on Veteran’s Day, we’ll release our third book in the series, Roadmap to Job-Winning Military to Civilian Resumes.

We could not be more excited about these books. Not only were they fun for us to write but, most importantly, they will be a great resource to those of you who fall into these unique fields and are unsure where to turn for information that is guaranteed to work.

How do we know our Roadmaps will successfully guide you on the path to a new career?  CareerPro Global has an 85% success rate in getting its clients through the door and into an interview. Plus we have a 99.6% satisfaction rate from all of our clients.

Now that is information you can trust.

To purchase the Senior Executive Service and Administrative Law Judge books today, click here To place a pre-order for the Military to Civilian Resumes book, click here.

Do you have any specific questions about our services and how we could be assistance to you? Follow this link to our main website and contact us for a free, no obligation consultation. We’ll be back in touch with you in no time at all.  Contact us for a free consultation today.